Advocacy by Canada's Ukrainian Diaspora in the Context of Regime

Central and Eastern European Migration Review Received: 9 July 2019, Accepted: 14 February 2020 Published online: 6 March 2020 Vol. 9, No. 2, 2020, pp. 35–51 doi: 10.17467/ceemr.2020.01 Helping the Homeland in Troubled Times: Advocacy by Canada’s Ukrainian Diaspora in the Context of Regime Change and War in Ukraine Klavdia Tatar* This paper analyses diaspora advocacy on behalf of Ukraine as practiced by a particular diaspora group, Ukrainian Canadians, in a period of high volatility in Ukraine: from the EuroMaidan protests to the Russian invasion of Eastern Ukraine. This article seeks to add to the debate on how conflict in the homeland affects a diaspora’s mobilisation and advocacy patterns. I argue that the Maidan and the war played an important role not only in mobilising and uniting disparate diaspora communities in Canada but also in producing new advocacy strategies and increasing the diaspora’s political visibility. The paper begins by mapping out the diaspora players engaged in pro-Ukraine advocacy in Canada. It is followed by an analysis of the diaspora’s patterns of mobilisation and a discussion of actual advocacy outcomes. The second part of the paper inves- tigates successes in the diaspora’s post-Maidan communication strategies. Evidence indicates that the diaspora’s advocacy from Canada not only brought much-needed assistance to Ukraine but also contributed to strengthening its own image as an influential player. Finally, the paper suggests that political events in the homeland can serve as a mobilising factor but produce effective advocacy only when a diaspora has already achieved a high level of organisational capacity and created well-established channels via which to lobby for homeland interests. Keywords: Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, EuroMaidan, Russian invasion, lobbying, homeland conflict, Rev- olution of Dignity Introduction At the end of 2013, a high degree of political and social tension in Ukraine led to protests known as the Euro- Maidan. The protests were triggered by the refusal of ex-president Viktor Yanukovych to sign Association Agreements with the European Union (EU). By January 2014, the peaceful anti-government protests turned * University of Ottawa, Canada. Address for correspondence: [email protected]. © The Author(s) 2020. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. 36 K. Tatar into violence and culminated in the Revolution of Dignity. One month later, in February 2014, the protests caused Ukraine’s President Yanukovych to flee to Russia, an event followed by Russia’s swift annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Donetsk and Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine. Needless to say, these events have over- shadowed all others for the global Ukrainian diaspora. The Ukrainian diaspora in Canada, the second largest diaspora in the world with over 1.4 million people claiming Ukrainian origin,1 appeared at the frontlines of advocacy for Ukraine. This paper aims to answer the following question: To what extent do significant political developments in the ‘homeland’ (e.g. Ukraine) affect patterns of diaspora mobilisation in general and lead to effective advocacy practices in particular? By using as a case study the Ukrainian Canadian diaspora’s advocacy for Ukraine during the post-Maidan period (2013–2017) this study analyses the relationship between homeland events and their effect on the diaspora’s ability to advocate and mobilise for the cause. The findings rely on qualitative data collected by means of archival research, in-depth interviews, document and mass-media analysis and participant observation. Among my sources were Canadian mainstream and Ukrainian ethnic press, official publications of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, other diaspora organisations, government publications. Participant observation took place in Canada between 2014 and 2019 when I was attending different public events, rallies organised by the Ukrainian Canadians. Over 25 semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of the Ukrainian Canadian community living in Canada, civil servants and some political staffer working for Canadian Members of Parliament during 2016–2019. Purposive sam- pling was selected as a strategy for choosing the participants for this study. This means that individuals were selected for interview based on who they are or were, what they do or did and what they know about Ukrainian diaspora activism in Canada and the process of advocacy on behalf of Ukrainian Canadians. Theoretical accounts of diaspora mobilisation and advocacy First of all, it is important to stress that this article adopts neither a purely constructivist nor essentialist definition of diaspora. Instead, it follows Grossmann’s approach, which views diaspora as a transnational community whose members share a number of attributes such as dispersal or immigration, location outside a homeland, community orientation to a homeland, transnationalism and group identity (Grossmann 2019: 1267). This approach sees diasporas as both actual social formations (entities) and social constructs (Gross- mann 2019: 1265). The diaspora literature almost unanimously argues that the power of an event, in particular political tension in the homeland, affects diaspora communities in a variety of ways (Baser 2014; DeWind and Segura 2014). Significant political tension in the homeland can be important for triggering a wave of ethnic political mobilisation in the diaspora that makes the latter politically more active (Hockenos 2003; Shain 2007; Smith 2005). Homeland conflicts and wars in most cases have the strongest impact on diaspora mobilisation, in both positive and negative ways. Negative influences have been traced in the cases of Croatian and Tamil mobilisation in Canada (Godwin 2012; Winland 2007), because their activity became connected to the transfer of funds and illegal arms to conflict zones, thus further fueling conflicts. Mearsheimer and Walt (2007) have noted that the most violent periods of the Arab–Israel conflict were connected with the most active phases of Jewish lobbying in the USA. Moreover, a larger part of the literature studying the causes of mobilisation focuses on how a trigger event impacts diaspora–homeland relations, changing already established advocacy patterns of diaspora groups in the countries of their residence. This last development is the primary focus of this article. Many scholars of diaspora studies identify certain diasporas as being conflict-generated. For instance, Co- lumbian, Croatian, Albanian and Sri Lanka diasporas are often viewed as such (Godwin 2012; Winland 2007). Central and Eastern European Migration Review 37 The Ukrainian diaspora has never been classified as such because its consciousness had been generated through other means and the conflict in Ukraine came to the diaspora as an unexpected and frustrating development. Since the 1970s, an increasing number of scholarly works have paid attention to the political influence of ethnic groups, especially in regard to foreign policy. Most authors have viewed the political activities of ethnic groups as a legitimate phenomenon of liberal democratic states that can be compared to the political activism of other interest groups (Mearsheimer and Walt 2007; Smith 2005). The vast body of literature on diaspora political lobbying has focused on answering the question: Under what conditions are ethnic actors able to influence the policy process? There are a number of assumptions that scholars offer to explain cases of diaspora advocacy influence. The abundance of research available on this topic says that diaspora groups’ success de- pends on a variety of factors, which can roughly be divided into structure-based and agency-based ones (Rytz 2013), the most-cited of which are the lobby’s organisational capacity (Watanabe 1984), its political salience (Rubenzer 2008), the nature of the cause which the diaspora advances, the absence of a competing lobby group with an opposing cause and the alignment of the diaspora’s interests with those of the state. The latter idea received particular attention from interest-group scholars – Rubenzer calls it ‘strategic convergence’, while DeWind and Segura (2014) utilised the term ‘convergence/divergence theory’. The concept of strategic convergence suggests that, in order to move its file forward, it is important for an interest group to find common ground with a government’s agenda (Haney and Vanderbush 1999; Smith 2014). In this paper I aim to show the extent to which these theories still hold and which one has the highest relevance when advocacy’s ultimate goal is to assist a homeland in mitigating the consequences of ongoing conflict. Different diaspora groups representing the same ethos but living in different parts of the world allegedly have varying degrees of influence on foreign policy (Laguerre 2013; Satzewich 2002). So how can we measure the influence of ethnic lobbying? The question of influence is a highly debated topic in political science, especially in the ethnic lobbying literature. Influence can be either ‘perceived’ or real. In this paper I adopt the definition of influence used by Helen Helboe Pedersen (2013), who views it as control

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